You Think I Do WHAT? Vol. 8

Years ago, someone asked what I did for a living.

The real answer is “supply chain and customs brokerage” — a phrase with all the erotic energy of a filing cabinet.

So instead, to be humble, I said:

“I move boxes.”

That sentence has cost me eleven weekends and a functioning lower back.

Because here’s what nobody warns you about radical understatement. People believe it. Immediately. Gratefully. And then they act on it.

I am now, to my entire extended family, a professional mover.

Not “a guy whose job involves logistics.” A mover. Strong back. Good with a dolly. Available Saturdays. My sister-in-law introduces me at parties as “the one who moves things for a living.” She says it with pride. The one time I tried to correct her, she handed me a box.

Let me be clear about the scale of the misunderstanding. At 2 a.m., my phone decides whether a forty-million-dollar production line runs Monday. So, naturally, I told everyone I move boxes.

Remember when UPS tried to make us sexy? The jingle? “That’s logistics”? An entire ad campaign, millions of dollars, engineered to convince the world that supply chain is thrilling.

It did not take. We remain deeply unsexy. So I stopped fighting it, started saying “boxes,” and the universe took me at my word.

Now the phone rings and it’s Brenda, and Brenda is moving this weekend.

“You move boxes, right? You’re basically a pro!”

Brenda. I have never, in my professional life, personally lifted a box. I have lifted a pen. I have lifted, on a hard day, my own spirits.

Doesn’t matter. I own a pulse and a vaguely truck-adjacent skillset. I’m coming over.

And here’s the tragedy. I’m good at it.

Because two decades of loading shipping containers gives you an unholy instinct for packing a U-Haul. I see the truck. I see the couch, the mattress, the seventeen mystery bins. And my brain, entirely against my will, begins to optimize.

Weight low and forward. Fragile up top. Fill every void. Mind the axle.

I Tetris that truck like it owes me money.

And everyone stands in the driveway, nodding, and says the words that seal my fate for eternity:

“See? A natural. He does this for a LIVING.”

Then Brenda’s boyfriend tried to Venmo me twenty dollars “for the labor.” Sir. I have posted a customs bond larger than your vehicle.

I am, at this point, in a group chat called “Saturday Crew.” I did not join it. There is no leaving. I have tried. I have appeared in three separate families’ moving-day photos. I am becoming folklore.

So yes. I move boxes.

I move eighteen thousand of them across an ocean. And I move exactly one futon up exactly three flights of stairs every single time somebody I’m related to signs a lease.

Same three words. Two completely different lives.

As a wise man recently put it: the wizard life chose us.

So please. For the love of God.

Stop helping me carry things.